Jack Parsons

Jack Parsons (born October 2, 1914, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died June 17, 1952, Pasadena, California) was an American rocket scientist and chemist who made significant contributions to the development of rocket technology and missile systems and was a cofounder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and of the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. He was also interested in the occult and for a time was an associate of Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Parsons’s occult activities eventually led to his being sidelined from the world of rocket research.

Childhood on Pasadena’s Millionaires’ Row

Parsons’s parents, Marvel and Ruth (née Whiteside) Parsons, moved to Los Angeles from Springfield, Massachusetts, almost a year before their son’s birth. Marvel Parsons supported his family as an automobile accessories salesman, but after his wife discovered that he had been patronizing a sex worker, she divorced him in 1915 and cut off all communication between him and their son, changing the boy’s name to John Whiteside Parsons.

Ruth Parsons came from a wealthy manufacturing family, and after her divorce her parents moved to California to help support her and her son. They lived in the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena on Orange Grove Avenue, dubbed “Millionaires’ Row” because of the number of affluent residents there.

Although Parsons grew up in opulent surroundings, he did poorly in school and may have struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia. However, he was an avid reader of mythology, Arthurian legends, and science fiction and had a keen interest in space travel and rocketry. With a friend, Edward Forman, he conducted rocket experiments in the Parsonses’ backyard, in which they used the powder from cheap fireworks such as cherry bombs to try to launch a rocket.

As a teenager Parsons briefly attended a military academy, but he was expelled after his experiments caused him to blow up the school’s toilets. His family’s fortunes changed in 1929 when the stock market crashed, followed by his grandfather’s death two years later. Parsons left school for a time and worked a series of odd jobs. When he was 18 he began working at the Hercules Powder Company in Los Angeles. The company manufactured explosives and smokeless powders. There, Parsons gained important knowledge about the properties of different explosives. Meanwhile, he and Forman continued their rocket experiments, sometimes conducting them in the desert.

The Suicide Squad, JPL, and Aerojet

In 1933 Parsons began classes at Pasadena Junior College, where he intended to earn an associate’s degree in chemistry and physics. However, he dropped out after one term because of his family’s financial troubles. In 1935 he and Forman met Frank Malina, a graduate student at Caltech, after attending a lecture on rocket technology at the school. The three formed a rocketry group in which Parsons served as the group’s chemist, Malina as its mathematician, and Forman as its engineer.

The trio gained support from Theodore von Kármán, the director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT), which gave them access to Caltech’s resources. They were also joined by Chinese engineer Qian Xuesen (Ch’ien Hsüeh-sen), whose ability to quickly perform complex calculations flawlessly was an invaluable asset to the group. The group was offered a laboratory on the school’s campus and its members christened themselves the GALCIT Rocket Research Group. Their loud and dangerous experiments led others to nickname them “the Suicide Squad.”

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In 1938 the Suicide Squad relocated its activities to the Arroyo Seco canyon outside Pasadena. They focused on developing new, stable solid and liquid propellants to fuel rocket engines, and Parsons’s chemical genius was crucial to the group’s breakthroughs. Anointed the group’s “delightful screwball” by von Kármán, Parsons liked reciting British occultist Aleister Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan” before rocket tests.

World War II and the U.S. military’s need for motors and rocket research brought funding to the group’s activities. The group developed a prototype of a jet-assisted takeoff rocket, which became the standard rocket engine for the military’s long-range missiles. In 1941 the group founded the Aerojet General Corporation, the first American manufacturer of liquid- and solid-propellant rocket engines. In 1944 its working space at the Arroyo Seco canyon became the JPL, which is now overseen by NASA.

Personal life and occult activities

In 1935, the same year that Parsons had met Malina, he married Helen Northrup. Meanwhile, he cultivated his interests in mythology and science fiction, even joining a local science-fiction club and writing a screenplay with Malina about rocket scientists.

Parsons also had an interest in the occult, in particular the writings of Crowley. Crowley had invented a new religion called Thelema that was based on so-called “magick” rituals and espoused sexual libertinism. Parsons and his wife first attended a Thelema ceremony in 1939 and quickly became disciples.

Parsons began performing magick rituals and attempted to draw friends and acquaintances into his and Helen Parsons’s new lifestyle. One of these was Helen Parsons’s younger sister, Betty (or Sara) Northrup. In 1941 the Parsonses were initiated into a local Thelema commune. That same year Jack Parsons began an affair with Northrup, who was 17 years old. Soon after, Helen Parsons began an affair with the spiritual leader of their commune, with whom she had a son.

In 1942 Jack Parsons bought a mansion on Millionaires’ Row that became the center of Pasadena’s occult community. Known as the Parsonage or Grim Gardens, the mansion gained notoriety for the wild parties hosted there, usually involving sex orgies, magick rituals, and experimentation with drugs. Parsons maintained his relationship with Northrup and initiated formal divorce proceedings from Helen Parsons in 1945. That same year a science-fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard, whom Jack Parsons had befriended, joined their community.

However, Hubbard began an affair with Northrup, who soon took up a full-time relationship with him. In response, Parsons performed a magick ritual in which he attempted to summon a sex goddess called Babalon or “the Scarlet Woman” who would become Parsons’s companion.

About this time Marjorie Cameron, a former member of the Navy, visited the Parsonage and began an affair with Parsons. She and Parsons married in 1946. The commune on Millionaires’ Row had meanwhile disintegrated, and Parsons sold the mansion. For a time he and Cameron lived in the coach house behind the mansion before moving to Manhattan Beach, California. Parsons had found work in nearby Inglewood at North American Aviation.

Hubbard and Northrup had announced a business venture in which they planned to purchase yachts and resell them at a profit, and they persuaded Parsons to invest the bulk of his savings (more than $20,000) in their venture. Instead, they absconded to Miami with Parsons’s money and bought a yacht for themselves. Parsons followed them and spent several days trying to track down Hubbard and Northrup, all the while performing more rituals in his hotel to punish them. Although he recovered a portion of his money, his friendship with Hubbard was permanently damaged.

Final years and death

Parsons’s professional life also fell into shambles. He was stripped of his security clearance for Aerojet in 1948 after being investigated by the FBI (as were a number of his rocketry friends), presumably for having attended some Communist Party meetings before World War II. For a while he made ends meet by working at a gas station and as an assistant in a hospital, among other jobs. He turned to his magick rituals, began writing a political tract called “Freedom Is a Two-Edged Sword,” and declared to a friend that he was the Antichrist.

Parsons’s friends intervened on his behalf, and he was hired at Hughes Aircraft Company in Culver City, California, to work on chemical plant design and construction. However, he remained under the watch of the FBI, and in 1950 he lost his security clearance for this job after removing confidential documents related to explosives and rocket propellant manufacture without permission.

Parsons and Cameron moved back to Pasadena, where they lived in a coach house on Millionaires’ Row. For a while he worked for various powder companies while awaiting the news of whether he would be prosecuted for espionage. Although the U.S. attorney general in Los Angeles decided against prosecuting him, Parsons’s security clearance was permanently revoked.

By 1952 Parsons was employed by a company that made special effects for Hollywood films. He was working in his home laboratory in Pasadena in June that year when he was killed by an explosion. It is believed that he had dropped a mixture of chemicals.